Brandon's Basic HTML

Wednesday, April 07, 1999

If you want to learn a little about Hyper Text Markup Language and you know what I'm talking about then you have come to the right place. By no means am I any type of webmaster but I'm trying and at the same time I'd like to help out my fellow newbies J . First I'll show you what the general Layout of an HTML document looks like. This is for the people who don't have an HTML assistant and have to use trusty old wordpad.

{General Layout} {Definition of Terms} {Text enhancers} {Hyperlinks} {Lines} {Images} {Active Images} {Active Image Borders} {Alignments}

GENERAL LAYOUT

Fisrt things first if you are not an internet wizard which most aren't. you are not going to have an understanding of html. The first thing that you must understand are "tags" these tags (the less than " < " and greater than " > " signs) float around all html commands. You will hear many different terms to describe tags there are three that I've heard so far and they are "markup's", "tags", and "flags". For generalization purposes I'm going to use the word "tags". So on we go with the general layout of an HTML document

<HTML>
<TITILE>The title goes here</TITLE>
<HEAD> The headline of your page goes here</HEAD>
<BODY> The body makes up the bulk of your page</BODY>
</HTML>

Think of this layout as an essay you have titles, headings, subheadings, and introductions and then of course the body of the text.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

<HTML>
This tells the browser or computer that the document is written in the Hyper Text Markup Language.
<TITLE>
This tells the browser the name of the document currently being used if you look to the top left hand corner of the screen you will see the title for this page "Basic HTML". It is also used by search engines to depict keywords.
</TITLE>
This is called a closing tag the backslash in </TITLE> tells the browser that that the title is over. These closing tags are used to stop certain functions which you will see further down the page.
<HEAD>
This tells the browser to display whatever it is that you want at the top of the screen. This is also where you decide on your background.
</HEAD>
This tells the browser that there are no more headings other than what is between these two tags(<HEAD>your text or whatever goes here </HEAD>).
<BODY>
This is pretty much self explanatory. If you think of it as an essay, the body of an essay is usually based after the intro and carries the rest of the essay.
</BODY>
This closes the section of the document that contains the body of the page.
</HTML>
Tells the browser to stop reading because the document is done.

TEXT ENHANCERS

Text enhancers change the font, color, style and appearance of the text on your page. Below I will give explantions of such things.

To bold your text

Your text goes here. Would look like

this Your text goes here as you can see these enhancers also require closing tags if I did not place a closing tag at the end of the above statement the bold effect would not stop until I did.

To italicize you text

Your text goes here Would look like…

this Your text goes here

To make text look typeset

<TT>Your text goes here</TT> Would look like…

this Your text goes here.

To underline your text

The same idea only the command is text…

Colors, Fonts and alignment.

Now on to the fun stuff like changing text font, color, and alignment.When changing fonts keep the fact that if the viewer of your page does not have that paticular font installed on their computer it won't show up.

The first one I learned is how to change the color

<FONT COLOR="#HEXCODE"> Ahhh! What's a hexcode. Well it’s a hexidecimal 
equivalent of a certain color. Weird hungh? Like for example the hexcode for 
the background on this site is "#6262ff" If you want a full listing of the hexcodes 
and colors CLICK HERE, oh yeah and don't forget to close that color unless of course
you want to use that color for the rest of the text on your document use this tag to 
close all tags that have the words FONT in them </FONT>.
 

Now changing the font is even more fun here’s the tag that does it 
<FONT FACE="correctly spelled name of font">oh yeah and unless you are 
planning to use this font for the rest of your page use this </FONT>

That's all for tonight this page will be updated tommorow sorry… 
if you want to learn more about HTML check out this site it’s where I learned all 
that I know now and more. www.htmlgoodies.com